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Maybe We're Seeing a Backlash to the Whitelash

Making sense of Tuesday night's Democratic sweep.

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Oh, and happy one-year anniversary, gang. Still having fun, are we?

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By Charles P. Pierce

Nov 8, 2017

And I said, "The backlash is coming here." She said, "Yeah, it'll be a whitelash here." That was in the back of my mind. People think I made that term up on the spot. It's very rare you can put two syllables together and make the entire case.

—Van Jones on Election Night 2016, to this publication, earlier this week.

Like a surfer on a placid sea, Ed Gillespie waited for the whitelash to carry him home, waited for it to build behind him so that he could ride its formidable power into the governorship of Virginia. He did everything right; of course, once you’ve flacked for Enron, you don’t have to stoop too far to find the gutter.

Over the last few weeks before the election, Gillespie ran a stunningly racist campaign. He tried to link his opponent, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, to the violent Central American gang, MS-13. He ran on keeping the state’s monuments to the traitors who rose in armed rebellion against the United States in 1860.

He put his tailored lobbyist’s suits in the closet and tried on the loincloth and face-paint of the true culture warrior. He did it so thoroughly that the Republican pundits on TV who’d known Gillespie in the old days expressed great sorrow that he’d obviously turned to the dark side, to that grim place in his party’s soul that his fellow Republicans had learned long ago not to examine too closely.

Ed Gillespie sat there and waited for a wave that every political instinct told him was sure to come. And it never did.


Maybe it was the backlash to the whitelash. Maybe Gillespie just couldn’t carry the Neanderthal act off. Or maybe the voters of Virginia were just tired of being part of the peanut gallery for a vulgar talking yam.

Northam won by a resounding nine points. His sweep was total. The Democrats even carried so many seats in the state’s House of Delegates that control is going to be decided through recounts, and they did it by casting a net far and wide for candidates.

Bob Marshall, a 26-year Republican incumbent whose clownish homophobia had brought him to the attention of this shebeen long ago, lost to Danica Noem, a heavy-metal vocalist, former TV reporter, and the first trans person ever elected statewide in this country.

Despite her unique biography, Noem ran on one of the oldest and most important issues in American politics: improved road construction. To have the first trans candidate elected on a platform straight out of Tip O’Neill is extraordinarily encouraging.
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Elsewhere, Jackson Miller, the GOP legislative whip, lost to a Marine veteran named Lee Carter, who ran as a Democratic Socialist. Late in the campaign, Miller’s people sent around a flyer linking Carter to Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. That didn’t work, either.

In the western part of the state, a Democrat named Chris Hurst flipped a Republican-held seat; Hurst’s girlfriend, Alison Parker, was a TV reporter who was shot to death live and on camera. Unsurprisingly, Hurst ran, and won, on a gun-control platform. The Democrats also elected the first Latina ever to serve in the House.

Late last night, tweeting from South Korea, where he plugged his golf course, and where somehow failed to get applause from that country’s assembly for his installation of Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, the president* wasted no time tossing Gillespie overboard.

Donald J. Trump
✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump

Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!

The postmortems on this one are going to go in every direction, but the general outline of what was happening was clear all over the country. The priorities of the unanimously Republican national government were thoroughly rejected. In Maine, the voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to force that state to expand its Medicaid program.

That had nothing to do with the president*. That had to do with poor people in the rural areas of the state who need healthcare, and who no longer had any use for human bowling jacket Paul LePage, the governor who vetoed the expansion five times.

If you’re looking for an unsung hero in Virginia, and if you’re looking for a role model who should embarrass all the squabbling Democrats who are still relitigating the dismal 2016 primary process, look to Tom Perriello, the former Democratic congressman who lost to Northam in the Democratic primary this year.

Perriello suited up and worked tirelessly for the Democratic ticket up and down the ballot, including for the man who’d beaten him. Perriello’s performance not only piled him up serious cred within his party, it also should shame a lot of people in that party’s upper echelon.


Perriello and Northam at a Democratic primary debate.
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Moreover, the noxious tone adopted by Gillespie was rejected at almost every level of government all across the country. A Sikh was elected mayor of Hoboken, and a Liberian immigrant named Wilmot Collins ran as a progressive for mayor of Helena, Montana, and beat a four-term Republican incumbent.

African-American mayors were elected for the first time in Statesboro, Milledgeville, and Cairo in Georgia, and in St. Paul, Minnesota. Charlotte elected its first African-American woman to be its mayor.

All of these people were Democrats. If there is a wave coming in 2018, and I’m still not sure there is, these races are the stirrings of the underwater earthquake that produces a tsunami.
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The priorities of the unanimously Republican national government were thoroughly rejected.

It’s hard to know where this all leads. The next big test is the race for Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ old Senate seat in Alabama. God-crazed, defrocked judge Roy Moore is running against Democrat Douglas Jones, who, as a prosecutor, sent to prison the last conspirator behind the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Moore is barely ahead, but, if I were Jones’ field organizer, I’d have been up with the dawn on Wednesday morning, going full Knute Rockne on all my volunteers. And if I’m Tom Perez, I’m sending every dime I can find in the sofas of the DNC down there.

It’s fun to mock “diversity” and “inclusion,” especially if you’re a white conservative Republican, but diversity and inclusion had their revenge on Tuesday night, and if you happen to be a Republican congresscritter from a purpling suburban district, your next order of party business is to vote for a huge tax cut for the wealthiest among us at the expense of middle-class families. Good luck with that.

Oh, and happy one-year anniversary, gang. Still having fun, are we?

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